Still wearing my satin peignoir set and ostrich feather bathrobe, what I am is the ghost of a beautiful dead girl carrying this candle thing up Evie’s long circular staircase. Up past all the oil paintings, then down the second-floor hallway. In the master bedroom, the beautiful ghost girl in her candlelit satin opens the armoires and the closets full of her own clothes, stretched to death by the giant evil Evie Cottrell. The tortured bodies of dresses and sweaters and dresses and slacks and dresses and jeans and gowns and shoes and dresses, almost everything mutilated and misshapen and begging to be put out of its misery.
The photographer in my head says: Give me anger.
Flash.
Give me vengeance.
Flash.
Give me total and complete justified retribution.
Flash.
The already dead ghost I am, the not-occurring, the completely empowered invisible nothing I’ve become, I wave the candelabra past all that fabric and:
Flash.
What we have is Evie’s enormous fashion inferno.
Which is dazzling.
Which is just too much fun! I try the bedspread, it’s this antique Belgian lace duvet, and it burns.
The drapes, Miss Evie’s green velvet portieres, they burn.
Lampshades burn.
Big shit. The chiffon I’m wearing, it’s burning, too. I slap out my smoldering feathers and step backward from Evie’s master bedroom fashion furnace and into the second-floor hallway.
There are ten other bedrooms and some bathrooms, and I go room to room. Towels burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel No. 5, it burns. Oil paintings of racehorses and dead pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn. Evie’s bad dried flower arrangements, they’re these little tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie’s Katty Kathy doll, it melts, then it burns. Evie’s collection of big carnival stuffed animals—Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie, Poo Poo, and Ringer—it’s a fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too precious.
Back in the bathroom, I snatch one of the few things not on fire:
A bottle of Valiums.
I start down the big circular staircase. Manus, when he broke in to kill me, he left the front door open, and the second-floor inferno sucks a cool breeze of night air up the stairs around me. Blowing my candles out. Now the only light is the inferno, a giant space heater smiling down on me, me deep-fried in my eleven herbs and spices of singed chiffon.
The feeling is that I’ve just won some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.
Like, here she is, Miss America.
Come on down.
And this kind of attention, I still love it.
At the closet door, Manus is whining about how he can smell smoke, and please, please, please don’t let him die. As if I could even care right now.
No, really, Manus wanted to be cremated.
On the telephone message pad, I write:
And I put the note under the door.
We’re going out to his car in the driveway. I’m taking him away. He’ll do everything I want, or wherever we end up, I’ll tell the police that he broke into the house. He set the fire and used the rifle to kidnap me. I’ll blab everything about Manus and Evie and their sick love affair.
The word “love” tastes like earwax when I think it about Manus and Evie.
I slam the butt of the rifle against the closet door, and the rifle goes off. Another inch, and I’d be dead. With me dead outside the locked door, Manus would burn.
“Yes,” Manus screams. “I’ll do anything. Just, please, don’t let me burn to death or shoot me. Anything, just open the door!”
With my shoe, I shove the poured-out Valiums through the crack under the closet door. With the rifle out in front of me, I unlock the door and stand back. In the light from the upstairs fire, you can see how the house is filling up with smoke. Manus stumbles out, power-blue-bug-eyed with his hands in the air, and I march him out to his car with the rifle pressed against his back. Even at the end of a rifle, Manus’s skin feels tight and sexy. Beyond this, I have no plan. All I know is I don’t want anything resolved for a while. Wherever we end up, I just won’t go back to normal.
I lock Manus in the trunk of his Fiat Spider. A nice car, it’s a nice car, red, with the convertible top down. I slam the butt of the rifle against the trunk lid.
Nothing comes back from my love cargo. Then I wonder if he still has to pee.
I toss the rifle into the passenger seat and I go back into Evie’s plantation inferno. In the foyer, only now it’s a chimney, it’s a wind tunnel with the cold air rushing in the front door and up into the heat and light above me. The foyer still has that desk with the gold saxophone telephone. Smoke is everywhere, and a chorus of every smoke detector siren sirening is so loud it hurts.
It’s just plain mean, making Evie in Cancun lie awake so long for her good news.
So I call the number she left. You know Evie picks up on the first ring.
And Evie says, “Hello?”
There’s nothing but the sound of everything I’ve done, the smoke detectors and the flames, the tinkle of the chandelier as the breeze chimes through it, that’s all there is to hear from her end of the conversation.
Evie says, “Manus?”
Somewhere, the dining room maybe, the ceiling crashes down and sparks and embers rush out the dining room doorway and over the foyer floor.
Evie says, “Manus, don’t play games. If this is you, I said I didn’t want to see you anymore.”
And right then:
Crash.
A half ton of sparkling, flashing, white-light, hand-cut Austrian crystal, the big chandelier drops from the center of the foyer ceiling and explodes too close.
Another inch, and I’d be dead.
How can I not laugh? I’m already dead.
“Listen, Manus,” Evie says. “I told you not to call me or I’ll tell the police about how you put my best friend in the hospital without a face. You got that?”
Evie says, “You just went too far. I’ll get a restraining order if I have to.”
Manus or Evie, I don’t know who to believe, all I know is my feathers are on fire.
Chapter 34
ump to around midnight in Evie’s house, where I catch Seth Thomas trying to kill me.
The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you’d look if you got the cherry pie in a pie- eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down, you can see the roof of my mouth, pink and smooth as the inside of a crab’s back, and hanging down around the roof is the white vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left.
There are times to wear a veil and there are not. Other than this, I’m stunning when I meet Seth Thomas
